The survey highlights the issues of what the CMI calls a “stressed out, unfulfilled workforce”. Some 23 per cent worry about making decisions, 32 per cent have lost respect for their manager and 10 per cent admit covering up mistakes.

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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Tesco Stores is one of a number of businesses focusing on strengths in their coaching. It’s a more affirming alternative than those approaches grounded in weakness fixing.

The UK’s largest retailer, it is also one of the largest in the world, with shops in Asia, Europe and North America. During the past decade it has expanded into new markets.

Tesco saw the strengths-focused approach as the ideal way to help it cope with the challenges of this diversification and rapid growth.

It wanted to develop strong, inspirational leaders and general managers with the awareness, techniques and mindset not only to capitalise on their own strengths but on the strengths and positive energy of those they lead.

It needed to ensure the agility and resilience to deal with increased work demands. It also wanted to ensure the availability, development and effective deployment of people to meet planned and new opportunities with confidence, resourcefulness and enthusiasm.

Tesco invited Strengths Partnership to partner with its HQ-based Leadership Academy. The aim was to deliver an international leadership development programme for its senior talent.

The programme has a strong emphasis on helping participants build strengths and take advantage of new business opportunities, so there was a natural fit with the strengths-focused approach of Strengths Partnership.

Participants were invited initially to undertake a Strengthscope multi-rater assessment tool1, which identifies a person’s ’significant seven’ strengths from a total of 24 commonly found work-related strengths. These are classified into distinct cluster areas: Emotional, Relational, Thinking and Execution.

A unique feature of the tool is that it provides feedback from up to eight co-workers on the extent to which the person’s significant strengths are visible and how they can use them more effectively.

Strengths Partnership consultants supported Leadership Academy personnel trained in Strengthscope to deliver the coaching. Phone sessions were used for those based outside the UK.

One-to-ones helped participants:

• understand the benefits of strengths-based development
• identify their ’standout strengths’ (three to four most important strengths from their significant seven)
• ’stretch’ their strengths to the next level through new opportunities within or outside their role, training or coaching others in the area of strength, building new skills and knowledge, and building agility through practising using strengths in different situations and ways
• develop innovative ways to overcome work challenges and performance blockages by fully engaging their natural strengths and productive energy
• identify their performance risk factors, including overdone strengths and limiting weaknesses.

Reducing risk

Rather than helping participants find ways to fix weaknesses, the emphasis was on helping people reduce the negative impact of their risk factors through one or more of three strategies: finding workarounds based on their own strengths, identifying partnership opportunities with others whose strengths were complementary to their own and building new habits and work patterns to minimise the impact of overdone strengths and limiting weaknesses.

During a five-day intensive development programme, participants were able to explore their Strengthscope profiles and learn from the initial session with strengths coaches and with peers in small discussion groups. They were encouraged to put their learning and insights to the test during a team-based business simulation exercise, which is the backbone of the programme.

Several factors have contributed to the programme’s success:

• 1 Robust training and careful selection of coaches to ensure an appreciative, strengths-focused coaching approach.
• 2 Ensuring coaching conversations and insights from the Strengthscope profiler are pragmatic and relevant by closely linking these with leaders’ specific challenges, opportunities and business realities.
• 3 Recognising the legitimacy of limiting weaknesses and overdone strengths as an inevitable part of human nature, while helping people tackle these risk factors through leveraging their own and others’ natural strengths.
• 4 Ensuring participants understand the importance of building stretch and agility in the way they use their strengths to take advantage of opportunities outside their comfort zone.
• 5 Being sensitive to the different cultural backgrounds of participants, including how a strengths-focused development approach might be affected by different cultural frames of reference. Encouragingly, our experiences with Tesco and other multinationals to date reveal that this approach is equally effective and positively received, regardless of participants’ cultural background.

Positive feedback

Measurement is ongoing but feedback from participants has been extremely positive.

Alistair Elliott, leadership development manager with the Tesco Academy, and one of the internal coaches on the programme, said:

“The idea of focusing on strengths has really been embraced by our managers and directors. People are now working strengths into their personal development plans and are giving considered thought about how to integrate strengths in their daily work.”

James Brook is co-founder and director of the Strengths Partnership www.strengthspartnership.com

A STRONG framework

The starting point for many coaching assignments is typically a problem or ‘gap’ that threatens to derail the leader’s career

This is hardly surprising since most of us – including the coach and client – have been brought up in a society that favours problems, gaps and failure over strengths, successes and opportunities. Many coaches still collude with clients on “areas for improvement” or “development needs” rather than helping people optimise their natural strengths and fulfil their true passion and potential.

To shift from this convenient and unproductive deficit-based belief system, a coach needs first to reflect on and reset their underlying beliefs about human growth and excellence. Executive coaching is essentially about helping to optimise the client’s performance, development and personal success, but many coaches fail to appreciate the unique strengths, positive action routines and enabling relationships which have contributed to clients’ past and current successes.

Clients are rarely psychologically impaired or flawed. They are simply imbalanced in the characteristics they have been endowed with. Everyone has natural strengths and talent offering true opportunities for mastery and excellence, as well as weaknesses which present varying levels of risks to their performance. The most important to address are those we call ‘limiting weaknesses’, which undermine task performance and/or relationships and therefore need to be reduced or, in the words of the great management guru, Peter Drucker2, made “less relevant”.

A focus on strengths doesn’t mean the coach should ignore weaknesses. Our experience with companies like Tesco suggests that leaders who are more aware of their strengths are also more confident, creative and resilient when dealing with their weaknesses, overdone strengths and other performance risks.

Our strengths-focused coaching process, the STRONG Business Coaching framework seeks to overcome some of the limitations of more traditional coaching frameworks by emphasising the centrality of strengths and successes in facilitating growth in a client’s competence, confidence and general sense of wellbeing. Individuals also start seeing old problems and performance blockers in a new light – through an empowering and energy-enhancing ’strengths lens’.

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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In the current economic climate, particularly in the UK public sector, we are hearing more and more about value for money, effectiveness and efficiency (see Van Doren et al, 2010¹). In short, many are feeling pressured to justify their own performance and that of those they manage.

People are concerned with how their performance is measured. As coaches, we are also concerned with performance. For some, however, its management has a different meaning. In his book, Coaching for Performance, Sir John Whitmore² argues the manager “must think of his people in terms of their potential, not in terms of their performance”.

Making assumptions

He goes on: “The majority of appraisal systems are flawed for this reason. People are put in performance boxes from which it is hard for them to escape either in their own eyes or their manager’s” (Whitmore, 2009, p14).

At a recent coaching and mentoring research day at Sheffield Hallam University, a group of participants examined the idea of performance management and its relationship with coaching. Our conclusion was that, when you talk about performance management, people associate this with performance measurement and a deficit model of organisations and people.

Rightly or wrongly, we tend to associate performance management with a bundle of tools and techniques such as 360-degree feedback, competency frameworks and appraisals, which are focused on dealing with under-performance and what people are not doing well. We also debated whether the label/brand of ‘performance coaching’ tapped into the same assumptions.

Glass half empty

We concluded that there was scope for this to happen. My concern is that by deliberating using the performance coaching label and working with such performance measurement tools we, as coaches, might be colluding with a glass half empty view.

As I have pointed out, this is quite different from what many coaches, like Whitmore, intend. To borrow a phrase from the organisational theorist, Tony Watson (2006)³, such coaches would argue that people are always in “a process of becoming” rather than being fixed in terms of their competencies.

I am not saying that managers or coaches should duck the idea of managing performance. But perhaps, as so often in coaching, it comes down to the questions we ask. Hence, it may be more important to ask: “What does good performance look like here?”, rather than: “What has prevented you from delivering on this?”

My work as a coach, coaching researcher and manager-coach, has led me to believe that we can often make assumptions that people understand what good performance looks like and that the challenge is one of motivation/commitment. This is one possibility.

Another is that they do not yet understand what this looks like and that they need help in understanding good performance better. This seems to be the case, particularly with my public sector coaching clients in the current climate of cuts.

Of course, a focus on good/excellent performance is embedded in process coaching models like GROW and OSKAR, with their emphasis on success and what already works well.

Nevertheless, in our efforts to work effectively with our sponsor clients, we need to be aware of the dangers of the deficit model of performance and of being drawn into perpetuating this in our approaches to coaching.

References

1 W Van Doren, G Bouckaert and J Halligan, Performance Management in the Public Sector, London: Routledge, 2010

2 J Whitmore, Coaching for Performance: GROWing Human Potential and Purpose – the Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership (4th ed), London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2009

3 T Watson, Organising & Managing Work, (2nd ed), London: Prentice-Hall, 2006

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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David Bohm¹ argues that our thoughts are a reflex just like the knee jerk that follows the doctor’s rubber hammer. External stimulus is the hammer, our senses the knee and the thought we have, the reflex. Libet² presents evidence to show that our conscious thoughts are a post-event rationalisation of what occurred, with the decision to act taken microseconds earlier in our subconscious. Wegner³ tells us our conscious will is an illusion.

I’m telling you all this to get you looking at the way you think and make decisions. There are some surprising things going on – things that are often not in the best interests of the outcomes we seek.

So, what kind of interventions can help us – and our clients – achieve better outcomes?

We use our conscious and unconscious thoughts to make decisions. Cognitive science has shown that our decisions are heavily influenced by our own theories of the world, our memories and what we select from the environment. It has also shown that our decision-making processes are subject to biases that often work against our interests. Add to this our equal weighting of the assumptions we make about facts, and it’s no surprise our decisions are often found to be wanting.

Understanding how we make a decision presents us with an opportunity to achieve even better outcomes.

How do we decide?

Cognitive and Neuroscience research is still at the early stages of understanding how we think and make decisions. One view is that a decision flows from theories we hold about the world, the memories we have and the information we select from the environment.

If you give two people the same information they often make a different decision – and are fully committed to their choice. How can both believe they’re right?

The thesis for my Masters in Cognitive and Decision Science⁴ looked at the decisions that football team managers Arsene Wenger (Arsenal) and Sir Alex Ferguson (Manchester United) took in the football transfer market.

Over a long period in which both had similar access to funds and possible purchases, they rarely competed for the same player. By studying what they said and wrote about the purchases they made it is possible to draw distinctions about what is important to them in making their decision.

For example, one is focused on financial prudence and developing young talent to maturity and the other interested in proven stars and is comfortable with debt.

I leave you to judge which you believe is right, based on the evidence available. Your theories of the world, memories and the information you select will give you your choice. If you look around yourself you will see examples of different people using the same information to arrive at different decisions.

Theories about the world

People’s theories about the way the world works build up over their lives. As time progresses these views become increasingly difficult to change. We experience the world, make sense out of it, observe what happens and create a theory. This is part of our survival process and enables us to react quickly when faced with a threat – or an opportunity.

We are designed to be more interested in a threat¹, by a factor of 2.25:1, versus an opportunity. Our cognitive machinery is there to protect us and give us the best chance of survival. Our theories are full of assumptions that we treat as if they were facts. The trade-off in the survival game is between speed of response to an experience versus time to evaluate the factual accuracy of an assumption.

You would rather rely on an assumption if it saves your life than spend more time working out if it is factually correct.

If your theories are appropriate for the context you are in you will often succeed. However, in a world of rapidly changing context, it is important to know when your theories are no longer appropriate – before failure informs you.

What can you or your clients do to intervene with your own theories to get better outcomes?

Interventions

1 Recognise that your theories are just that – dependent on assumptions

This is the easiest and most powerful intervention. Write down your theory about something and the assumptions you are making, then ask the question: ‘How could the opposite be true?’ This will open up new possibilities.

2 Spend time with people who have different theories to you and listen generously to them

What are the differences in assumptions and theories between you, and is there something better for both of you?

3 Recognise the amplification of potentially negative threat in your theories and assumptions versus opportunity

This can lead to a dramatic change in how you will act. If you scale down a threat by a factor of 2.25, consider what you would do. This can be life changing for many as they reduce the risks that go with changing and pursue what they see as the opportunity they would like to pursue.

Memories

The paradox of memories is that they are created and available to us in the present yet are not a true representation of what occurred in the past. A memory is created in the present from a combination of a very small number of attributes stored about the past and what we use in the moment to create the current form of this memory. It’s why witnesses in courtrooms can be unintentionally unreliable and situations you know were unpleasant can be called up with happy feelings.

There are many cognitive experiments demonstrating how we unknowingly change our memories from what occurred. It has also been shown that if there is a conflict between a memory, a theory we hold and information in the current environment, we will change our memory.

So we are using these incomplete memories in the decisions we make. How can we intervene with our memory process to get better outcomes?

Interventions

1 Recognise your memory is not a true reconstruction of what occurred

See it as a story you are telling yourself about the past. Explore if there is a better set of assumptions you can make to create a more powerful and useful memory.

2 Select a different memory for the decision you are going to make

Theories and bias may have led you to a particular memory, but there could be better memories to select in support of different choices available to you.

Environmental information

It isn’t possible to consider every piece of available information when making a decision. Time and processing capability prevent this. You therefore have to make choices about the information you are going to use. This will depend on what you are intending to do and your theories about the world. For example, if you are going to post a letter your senses will be tuned in to seeking post boxes and your theories will guide you to where they might be. You will ignore everything unimportant to this task.

At work the task you have chosen as important will determine the information you select, and lead you to ignore other information that may be useful. What interventions can you make to consider other information that will improve your outcomes?

Interventions

1 Notice the information you select

The next step is to search for alternative information and see what impact it has on the possible decisions available to you.

2 Consider a different task

Look at this information in relation to the original task and see what new insights become available to you.

3 Discuss with other people what information they are using

Explore what that might do to your possibilities.

Don’t believe it

Thinking and making decisions is something you do all the time. It might be a reflex and it may also be an illusion that we have any control over it. Understanding how you think and make decisions is a first step to making better decisions. Using some of the interventions in this article will often give you new insights and help you make better decisions with better outcomes.

Len Williamson is an executive coach at Praesta Len.Williamson@praesta.com

References and further information

• 1 D Bohm, Thought as a System, Routledge, 1994
• 2 B Libet, W Elwood, JR Wright, B Feinstein and D K Pearl, “Subjective referral of the timing for a conscious sensory experience”, in Brain, 102(1), pp193-224, 1979
• 3 D M Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will, MIT, Bradford Books, 2002
• 4 L Williamson, “Arsene Wenger vs. Alex Ferguson: The role of causal models in management decision making”, UCL, 2009 (available from the author: Len.Williamson@praesta.com)
• D Kahneman and A Tversky, “Prospect theory: An analysis of decision under risk”, in Econometrica, 47(2), p263, 1979
• D Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Harper 2008
• J Baron, Thinking and Deciding (4th ed), New York, NY: Cambridge Press, 2008

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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Part 4: Where do businesses stand in the design and implementation of coaching programmes?

Coaching is one of the fastest growing business phenomena in the world. In practice though, the design, implementation and optimisation of company programmes is still in its infancy.

The quality of coaching programmes is, on average, low.

It can be quite a disappointment to look behind the curtain in many companies, even in those that claim coaching is a substantial part of their corporate culture. There is a real risk that coaching may end up being used superficially at symptom level or that organisations merely pay it lip service to raise their profile.

Positive exceptions

There is good news though: the number of professionally implemented programmes with good results is increasing.

Our book1 presents 23 detailed high-quality company case studies written by HR/OD/L&D managers from across the globe, responsible for coaching in their companies. These include SAP, MTN, BBC, a Chinese producer of optical devices, NASA, T-Mobile, Ramada Hotel, PepsiCo and Nordea Bank.

While there is room for further improvement, all have thought through their coaching programmes in a systematic way and have tailored their initiatives to their specific context and business strategy. They have made deliberate choices about the coaching forms they used and have worked out concepts and plans (for example, clear objectives).

When implementing coaching, these companies formulated learning points, for example:

• Always have a clear picture of where you want to go and the purpose of your coaching.
• Think of coaching as part of your long-term strategic plans.
• Make best use of coaching to achieve alignment and synchrony with your business strategy.
• When making professional use of coaching, its benefits far outweigh its costs.
• Coaching is fully leveraged when it is an integrated part of the larger learning system and organisational culture.
• Implementation works well with strong support and permanent involvement at the top.

Quality of coaching

What do we mean when we say that the current, average quality of coaching programmes in business is low? The following three statements best illustrate this:

1 Poor qualifications of many implementers

Managers and directors responsible for coaching in their firms are often not sufficiently qualified to fulfil their roles.

There are many reasons for this:

• Coaching, and in particular its systematic implementation, is still new, and often done by trial and error
• The coaching industry itself was, and for the most part still is, unable properly to provide managers with systematic guidance and support in planning its implementation.
• The managers responsible for coaching often have a whole range of tasks, one of which is coaching.
• Coaching, and the proper qualifications of the responsible manager, may have low importance in companies.
• There is often a lack of organisational power within HR/OD/L&D and of their acceptance as a real strategic business partnership.
• Many implementers are reluctant to admit the limits of their capability or to get the external support they need. As a result, failures go unrecognised or are not made public.

2 Lack of real coaching plans/concepts in companies

Most businesses still have an ad hoc approach to coaching and don’t think through their initiatives. Even when firms invest quite heavily, for example, in single coaching services, there is often a lack of systematic planning to ensure their most effective, organisation-specific application.

Many companies use coaching, but don’t have a clear understanding of it and the reason they are using it. Also, the practice of coaching evaluation is generally poor.

3 No, or very low, strategic integration of coaching

For any coaching to be successful, it needs to be clearly linked to company strategy. However, in some organisations, you may still come across coaching programmes that simply:

a) contradict and work against existing corporate, business and/or functional strategy

b) do not contradict current strategies, but do not support them: they run in parallel without really having an impact on business success, and

c) could easily be linked to strategy, but are not and therefore lose momentum, acceptance and impact.

All of these scenarios are unsatisfactory. Coaching only starts to become value-adding and sustainable where it visibly serves business strategy and success. To do this, companies must deploy coaching as a direct means of achieving strategic objectives.

They must establish strong links between interventions and corporate, business and/or functional strategy. Where coaching has a particularly high strategic importance for a firm, it should also be explicitly included in the strategy itself.

Yet in many organisations coaching is only used case-by-case, or is a low-key, standard part of HR or L&D strategy. This means the organisation has integrated coaching as a standard personal development tool in its HR or L&D portfolio, thereby keeping it rather general and off-the-shelf.

In short, we need much better qualified developers and implementers of coaching programmes in companies, much better thought through concepts and plans and much better linking of programmes to business strategy.

Management and delivery

The management task of designing, implementing and optimising successful coaching programmes should be distinguished from the actual delivery of interventions (for example, professional coaching delivered by coaches or coach training provided by trainers).

In your role as manager/director responsible for coaching in your company, you need capability in implementing programmes. It is about setting the frame of reference and direction of coaching within a company and the high-level management of initiatives.

A new discipline

The difference between management and delivery is new and hasn’t yet been understood by many companies. While the awareness of the distinction has increased in recent years, a lot of companies still try to implement coaching by improvising on the basis of their classic HR skills plus classic coaching skills. But this is not enough.

Make a self-assessment

We suggest you go through the following sequence of steps to identify your own company-specific needs for external support in implementing and optimising coaching programmes:

1 Honestly assess your level of existing literacy regarding design, implementation and optimisation of coaching programmes

What qualifies you to be a manager responsible for coaching in your company?

2 Honestly analyse the gap between your current level and the capability needed to implement coaching successfully in your firm

Establish your organisation-specific coaching needs and the skills required to implement this in your firm (and for your role specifically). Compare your existing and required capability.

3 Identify your exact needs for external support

Once you have determined there is a need for external support, formulate your need as clearly and precisely as possible. Think about the focus, nature and reach of it.

4 Contact us to explore the possibility of collaboration

Email: info@bresser-consulting.com

The Global Business Guide for the Successful Use of Coaching in Organisations (ebook PDF, ISBN 978-3-9808833-9-9), by Frank Bresser (ed. Amanda Bouch) is available at: www.frank-bresser-consulting.com

Frank Bresser MBA is a global business expert on implementation and optimisation of coaching in organisations. He received the Global HR ‘Strategic Leadership Award’ 2011 at the World HRD Congress 2011. Email: frankbresser@bresser-consulting.com

Could you implement a second-generation coaching programme of excellence in your business?

Do you think your organisation has what it takes to become an exemplary role model and pioneer in the design, implementation and optimisation of coaching programmes?

We are in the process of implementing second-generation coaching programmes of excellence in companies and are keen to generate case studies of organisations applying our seven frameworks in designing and implementing their coaching strategy. Organisations are welcome to apply (the earlier the better; no later than August).

To find out more, email: info@bresser-consulting.com

Figure 1 Poor average quality of coaching programmes in companies today
Figure 2 Distinction between management and delivery
Figure 3 Gap analysis regarding your current level and the coaching capability needed to implement coaching successfully in your firm

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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The postgraduate certificate in Coaching, validated by the University of Sussex, has a different focus and structure to most coaching qualifications, said Sabine Stritch, senior consultant and lead for the new programme at Roffey Park.

“Most draw a wide mix of aspiring life coaches, executive coaches, line managers and so forth. Our qualification is different in that it is designed specifically for experienced practitioners who want to broaden their expertise to include coaching in organisations.

“We are targeting a learning community of like-minded people with three to five years’ experience at a fairly senior level, so this would include the likes of organisational development leaders, HR and L&D practitioners, plus line managers aiming to adopt a coaching style,” she said.

As well as attendance at modules and sets, participants must coach clients, be coached themselves and undertake supervision.

Stritch explained there is no predetermined syllabus: “Instead they are guided by a framework of self-managed learning, which allows participants to determine what they want to learn and how they are going to learn it, with others, in the context and framework of their organisation’s needs.”

After module two, participants form learning sets that meet regularly to assess and evaluate each other’s achievements.

For more information go to: www.roffeypark.com/coaching

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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Employers must radically overhaul how they develop leaders, including stepping up use of different types of coaching, if they are to meet the increasingly rapid pace of business change.

Talent management firm DDI’s 6th Global Leadership Forecast survey paints a worrying picture for organisational leadership capacity. Leaders rate themselves poorly and do not possess the skills necessary for business in the future, while businesses do not have a sufficient pipeline of talent and are failing to offer an effective mix of development methods, says the report, based on responses from more than 12,000 leaders and 1,800 HR professionals from 74 countries.

Leaders are still largely ineffective as coaches, reveals the report, stressing that coaching is a skill that can be learned and developed only through continuous practice and feedback.

Those organisations with more effective leadership development programmes tended to use four methods more often and more effectively: formal workshops plus three types of coaching – manager, internal and external. Many use workshops and manager coaching well but are neglecting internal and external coaching.

Only 38 per cent of leaders regard their development as effective, while globally only 18 per cent (20 per cent in the UK) of HR professionals believe their organisation has the leadership strength to meet future challenges.

Steve Newhall, managing director, DDI UK, said: “Our research shows leadership quality hasn’t changed that much over the past six years despite the estimated £14bn spent globally each year on leadership development. If organisations are going to have in place the leadership they need, how they find, develop and promote new leaders must change.”

Some 38 per cent of leaders (36 per cent in the UK) rate their organisation’s leadership quality as high (only 25 per cent of HR professionals). And only 50-60 per cent of leaders believe they are effective in the skills needed for the next few years. These include coaching, and driving and managing change.

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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I was amazed when a colleague told me that the energy company she works for doesn’t use coaching. After all, it’s now part of normal management practices for most organisations, as a string of Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) surveys have shown.

Coaching and mentoring are powerful and enabling tools for raising performance, aligning people and their goals to the organisation, and cementing learning and skills¹. Coaching is also a powerful agent for driving cultural change and agility – organisations use it linked with organisational development².

However, coaching has an Achilles heel. Evaluation is largely neglected and this mustn’t continue, particularly in the current climate when every item and line of expenditure is being acutely scrutinised.

While the number of people who report the use of coaching is steadily rising, its real value is still not being captured, as we established in our 2010 Learning & Talent Development survey.

Make the link

Well under half of respondents used approaches such as linking coaching outcomes to key performance indicators (KPIs) or more quantitative and mixed-method approaches, such as return on expectation (ROE) and return on investment (ROI). Few linked coaching evaluation to performance and only 13 per cent frequently discussed evaluation at management meetings. Only about 20 per cent frequently collected and analysed data on the impact of coaching.

Clear and present danger

In difficult times, anything that cannot prove its value will be increasingly vulnerable. Coaching cannot claim a unique contribution to organisational performance and impact if its practitioners and champions assume its value rather than prove it. We need to build a convincing evaluation narrative, yet many organisations are failing to do this.

We need to move towards a systematic approach based on a thorough review of the coaching process. The CIPD sees evaluation as a cornerstone of effective coaching and we want to assist practitioners in developing best evaluation practice. So what’s getting in the way? Perhaps it’s our focus on delivery.

Delivery focus

Many practitioners think that developing and delivering coaching is what they are there to do. This can lead people to believe that simply introducing coaching is enough. As Jarvis et al pointed out in The Case For Coaching (2006), there is often an assumption that time spent in any learning activity such as coaching always has a positive payback. The authors also suggest that evaluation may not be addressed because we might uncover negative results that could threaten coaching. Although we know from our surveys that coaching is being used primarily for performance management and leadership development, we know less about its impact on those areas.

There are other issues too:

• An overuse of the Kirkpatrick model, even the augmented versions. Despite valiant attempts by Kirkpatrick and his successors to update the model, many use the least sophisticated version based on reactions and anecdote. But we need to look for broader and richer approaches to evaluation.
• An obsession with a very narrow view of ROI. This generally subtracts the costs from the benefits of a coaching assignment and expresses that as a percentage. This is meaningless without the context of the coaching and evaluation of other activities. Philips and Philips (2008), provide a much more robust and systematic ROI approach, which is detailed in the report. As evaluation expert Paul Kearns argues, ROI without a baseline is next to useless.
• Concern that evaluation is not a favourite activity of L&TD practitioners. We explain in the report that MBTI type ENFP is well over-represented in the coaching and L&TD community, so we have to be more mindful about developing evaluation. L&TD practitioners work best with delivery and collaboration over learning issues. Getting down to the data may not be their favourite task.
• Our use of the softer data around coaching is not systematic. For example, coaching conversations are a source of rich data about the progress of coaching. With an appropriate and proportionate approach to confidentiality we can use basic tools to capture the nature of the conversation.
• A lack of systematic collation of the sources of data to inform coaching. For example, psychometrics test pre-employment, manager reports, 360s and employee engagement scores, all provide valuable data.

Knowing and doing

So what should we do? Evaluation starts with delivery and what people want from us.

Stakeholders won’t expect us to produce a spreadsheet with scenario forecasts for coaching and ROI. They are more likely to be convinced if we can tell them how many people are coached, how much we spend on external coaches, the length of assignments and data on impact: perhaps engagement scores before or after coaching, or maybe anonymous 360 feedback on people’s ability to complete projects.

If we are also generous about interventions introduced by other departments and we can apportion some of the effect to coaching, we will have compelling evidence. That’s not happening enough.

We use the lift conversation with the finance director to illustrate how poor evaluation can undermine the resources available for coaching in testing times. According to our survey, roughly seven out of every ten lift conversations would not go well.

What next?

The CIPD believes that the best method of evaluation for any L&TD intervention is to take a holistic approach – the Value of Learning approach we refer to in our research with Portsmouth University (2007). We should shift from this narrow ROI to ROE approach. What did we expect the coaching intervention to deliver? Which behaviours or skills do we wish to see? What improvements?

This raises the issue of alignment. Aligning coaching interventions to the goals of the business is key. The basics are simple. Make it relevant, align what you are doing and measure it.

We provide a simplified graphic model of the approach in Figure 2 above. The RAM (relevance, alignment and measurement) approach is useful for all learning and talent interventions and keeps us focused on the outcome, not the process.

Finally, an integrated approach is vital. If, for example, we are unaware of the sponsorship and ownership issues within the organisation, we won’t get a clear view. If we are not conversant with the positioning and purpose of coaching we cannot design evaluation effectively. If we haven’t given a great deal of thought to how coaching is resourced and paid for, including issues like the role of external support and consultancy, the use of internal coaches and the training of line managers, we will not be able to evaluate effectively from the start.

The CIPD has developed the OPRA model (Figure 1), which helps practitioners think about coaching from the point of view of Ownership, Positioning, Resourcing, Procurement, Assessment and Evaluation. This thinking tool can help us to provide an effective space for evaluation.

What the CIPD surveys revealed

• Coaching is not being effectively evaluated (CIPD Learning & Talent Development surveys)
• Only 36 per cent of organisations evaluate coaching (CIPD L&D Survey 2010)
• The minority that do evaluate, focus on qualitative assessment, such as reaction and stories and testimony
• Where quantitative evaluation is used, it is often a crude use of return on investment (ROI)
• Evaluation is not being grounded in a capability perspective linking it to the organisation and people plan
• Good practice is out there and a more systematic mindset would deliver a step change in evaluation performance
• A wide range of data can be used for coaching evaluation, but practitioners need to access these data streams

Source: CIPD’s Real World Coaching Evaluation Project (autumn 2010)

Figure 1 The OPRA model
Figure 2 The RAM model

References and further information

• 1 CIPD 2011 Learning & Talent Development survey
• 2 CIPD Sustainable Organisation Performance: What Really Makes the Difference? Shaping the Future final report (January 2011)
• CIPD, Taking the Temperature of Coaching, 2009
• CIPD, Developing Coaching Capability in Organisations, 2008
• CIPD, Learning & Talent Development surveys’ Training and Development surveys, 2005-2010
• CIPD, Value of Learning: From Return on Investment to Return on Expectation, 2007
• J Jarvis, D Lane and A Fillery Travis, The Case for Coaching: Making Evidence-Based Decisions, CIPD, 2006
• P Kearns, How Accurate or Necessary is ROI for Learning and Talent Development? (Presentation to CIPD HRD Conference 6-7 April, 2011)
• J Passmore (ed), Psychometrics in Coaching, London: Kogan Page, 2009
• J Phillips and P Phillips, ROI in Action Case Book, Pfeiffer, 2008
• J Phillips and P Phillips, Show Me the Money: How to Determine ROI in People, Projects and Programs, San Francisco: Berrett Koehler, 2007
• J Pfeffer and R Sutton, The Knowing-Doing Gap, Harvard Business School, 2004

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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I am an internal coach who is part of a 10-strong team. We are finding that while many colleagues are happy to use us, senior managers are not. We’ve tried to publicise our work and get appointments with the individuals concerned to discuss what we offer. To be honest we just have no idea what is working or what is not.

Our company has invested heavily in our training – we have rigorous systems in place and an external coaching supervisor. In that sense we are all well-trained and well-supported, working to guidelines laid down by professional coaching bodies. We are all managers who were selected for the coach training programme by the external coaching training provider. We understand our organisation and the challenges we face.

We still use external coaches who have specialist skills, but the whole idea was to provide coaching services within the organisation and cut down on external coaches wherever possible. We believe that we offer a first-class service, however, we seem to be hitting our heads against a brick wall. We don’t know what and whether there is anything else we can do. Is this a normal experience for internal coaches or is it just something specific to us?

Gladeana McMahon

Director, Gladeana McMahon Associates

Most internal coaches come across this problem. Senior managers feel more comfortable talking to someone outside the organisation. Regardless of how robust your systems are, the terms of your confidentiality agreement and the quality of the services you offer, you will still be perceived as ‘too close for comfort’.

Most senior managers spend time projecting a competent image – anything perceived as showing weakness is unlikely to be welcomed. Although this is frustrating, it is also why organisations mix internal and external coaches.

External coaches are used either for specialist assignments outside the skills base of the existing internal coaching team or to coach senior managers.

It can do no harm to publicise your offer anyway, ensuring senior managers are up to date about the work you are doing. As the service builds a good reputation, these managers may well refer individuals to you. However, it may be better for your coaching team to focus on those colleagues more likely to use your services by building a good reputation for coaching delivery. As the message spreads through the organisation that the internal coaching offer really adds value, you may find that some senior managers will use the service. It is also possible that this will never happen.

Continue to promote your coaching service, but accept that this situation has nothing to do with the quality of your offer – and more to do with human nature.

Sara Hope

Director, The Internal Coach Ltd

One of the key insights of my research on internal coaching was around the attributes required for an internal coach to be effective in the eyes of their senior executives. The findings suggested the key factors were: technical coaching skills, coaching experience, understanding the organisation and credibility.

Credibility was seen as a function of being business-savvy, commercial and demonstrating that you ‘get’ the context in which your client operates.

The key factors that helped me build my reputation as an internal coach with senior executives were:

• Building success stories and articulating them in a way that engaged senior staff
• Demonstrating how a coaching conversation could add value from a business perspective
• Having clear examples of the cost/benefit of internal coaching
• Being prepared to challenge and explore assumptions/perceptions within the organisation about internal coaching.

Understanding the complexities of how internal coaching is experienced by business leaders, clients, HR and internal coaches themselves, is critical to success.

A next step is to ask senior managers what they believe is important for a coach to be effective in their context, and challenge their assumption that they may receive better coaching from an external coach. After all, there has been no empirical evidence to determine if specific skills or background make a difference to the effectiveness of coaches.
Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 4

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H Samuel´s in-store coaching programme has delivered a £732,891 return on an investment of £71,814.

The jewellery retailer introduced its shop floor coaching programme to help it boost sales by 1%. The Coach Approach programme was first piloted in 32 stores which were compared with a control group before being extended to the retailer´s 400 stores. Tracking of the 32 stores over a 12 month period showed they outperformed the rest of the stores by 2.2%.

Area managers are put through an ongoing facilitator development programme enabling them to coach sales assistants through what has just happened with a customer, taking advantage of “hundreds of coaching opportunities.”

“We have hundreds of customers a day, 100 in 15 minutes in some stores. We decided coaching was what we wanted to do rather than training as we felt our people already know what they need to do. We wanted them to understand the level of service they´re already offering, pinpointing where they are losing rapport and what they needed to think about doing differently,” said head of organisational development Gaynor Bradshaw. Bradshaw was speaking at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development´s HRD conference on 6-7 April in London.

Kevin Ryan, stores director of Signet Trading, which owns H Samuel, told delegates: “I felt a one-off programme wouldn´t pass muster, we needed a new way of life, of thinking. But it´s business and it needed a hard edge.”

The programme had four stages- in the first positioning stage, coaching wasn´t talked about. “The emphasis was on high energy, on how to get employees to talk about customers. We then moved into practices and upskilling, and embedding it,” said Ryan.

Development methods include telephone coaching, workshops, e-learning, role-modelling, coaching clinics and videos.
“We needed each and every one of our leaders to champion this. Without that, our programme wouldn´t have been as successful as it was. Being able to show that Kevin (Ryan) was going to do it too was very important,” said Bradshaw.

The business made sure it was very explicit about the behavioural changes it wanted to see, which helped it measure ROI, said Bradshaw. The retailer used mystery shoppers to track improvements in behaviours such as sales assistants asking customers about the intended gift recipient and occasion. Customer feedback showed they had experienced a higher level of service, more focussed on their occasion and life.

Coaching helped bring about an increase in positive staff opinion of around 20% compared to the previous year in a number of areas. These included “Signet has clearly explained what it expects of me in terms of the way I support, help and develop staff,” up 19% to 94% in 2009.

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